I agree with most of this post except that you should build to scale. Scaling isn't what you should be focused on. If you focus on this you will loose sight of the product you should be developing and responding to user feedback.
You're quite right - spending significant effort on scaling when you're building an MVP is probably wrong. The point is that we got our first 10,000 users without any scaling effort. When writing this post we talked a lot about this, and the wording is quite carefully chosen: be ready to scale. Having a contingency plan in case you need to scale, however, is a good idea if it doesn't cost too much (in either money or…
Great response. I would say that developing on Heroku and Google App Engine drives practices that lead to the ability to scale. This can be done with any hosting provider, as long as you are ready and know what to do.